Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires • Hacker News Board

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#181

Post by bradlys » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #133

adam12 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs to pay more taxes? Those people who aren't paying their fair share. Especially those who are using their wealth / power to get out of paying taxes.

Paper value is not the same as realized value, and doesn’t make sense to be included as part of someone’s “fair share”. Especially true when assets are inflated to all time highs. People are willing to buy tiny fractions of Amazon stock at its current valuation, no one is offering to buy all or even most of it at that valuation.

Short of being in a recession - assets are almost always at all time highs dude.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#182

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #169

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this site even make money? Ok, assuming that we're treating HN like a business and that business is large enough to have significant government voting share under this scheme: The government voting with its shares to silence those stories would potentially be actual censorship under the US constitution, and therefore illegal. The same cannot be said about private owners. Of course, the government could opt to tr…

I’d assume Facebook would be appointed a partisan czar during each administration, much like many government agencies. Unlike the EPA or FCC though, controlling Facebook has huge political implications.

Right, so it is best we leave that to Mark Zuckerberg, who surely has no political agenda whatsoever.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#183

Post by bradlys » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #153

curun1r wrote: post #119

The problem, as always, is implementation. Millionaires, especially those on the low end of that spectrum, tend to be fairly easy to tax. Their income sources are mostly regular and standard forms of income tax work pretty well. Billionaires are a very different animal. They have armies of lawyers and financial managers that help them navigate the movement of wealth through the global system to avoid taxation. They a…

Billionaires are going to react by lobbying very heavily to get loopholes created in the legislation. And each country writes their own legislation, which means each country creates their own set of loopholes. The net result is going to be that the tax system gets more byzantine, the government says "look, we started taxing billionaires", and the billionaires still aren't paying. But filing taxes will get more compli…

A lot of those people in congress would also be affected by the changes. They're not the kind to implement more taxes on themselves. After all - the difference in ideas between "conservatives" and "liberals" in office comes down to how much they want to wave a confederate vs pride flag. They have almost no fiscal differences and all want as low of taxes as possible on the highest NW individuals like themselves.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#184

Post by OscarCunningham » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

smhenderson wrote: post #151

OscarCunningham wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would incent people to spend on consumption when their wealth approached the cap, while not actually paying any of the tax. Thus more of the world's productive capabilities would be redirected towards rich people consuming luxuries that they otherwise wouldn't have bothered with.

Not saying I disagree but to play devil's advocate here - wouldn't them spending on luxury items still benefit society overall rather than them keeping it locked up somewhere? Working class people are the one's making and selling the luxury items and once injected into the economy the money they spent on said items would be taxed further and spread around as others spent it.

Wealth being 'locked up' doesn't matter. If we're at near full employment and our tools and machines aren't sitting idle, then we're producing at full capacity.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#185

Post by oliwarner » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

yayr wrote: post #45

This may be unpopular, but the hard thing in this discussion is to differentiate between consumption and investment. It does not help much to take wealth in terms of equity paper money away from people who know how to invest it efficiently and distribute it. On the other hand, there are minimum basic needs for consumption of food, health services, shelter, education etc. I agree that the system to finance those servi…

Is a 100% tax on (eg) assets over $1bn a punishment?

I'm not suggesting that exactly but I'm not against a wealth cap. I'm not sure what sort of person thinks they realise genuine benefit from spending time trying to spend it. Build a hospital. Subsidise public transport in your area. Do some good.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#186

Post by danaris » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

rvnx wrote: post #28

david927 wrote: post #3

Until there's a wealth floor -- until everyone is fed, sheltered and has access to education, there needs to be a wealth cap. We, as a collective humanity, should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million, until the basic needs of others have been met.

Such weird logic; we should level down everyone. I don't live in a nice house, so everyone should be stuck like me in an old flat until everyone can get nice house. I'm not happy -> Everybody should be unhappy

This is exactly the kind of misunderstanding—willful or not—that has been used to prevent progress on these types of issues for decades.

Even if we did what david927 suggests, and imposed a $20 million/person wealth cap globally, no one would be meaningfully "leveled down." The differences between the lifestyle of someone with $20 million and someone with $200 billion aren't that different: what's different is the level of power the latter has over people and governments. Power that has no checks and balances, no strings, no way of ensuring it's not massively abused. And given the kind of person you need to be to amass a fortune in the billions in the first place, it's nearly guaranteed that it will be abused.

The amount of money people are actually talking about taking from the billionaires will not affect their lifestyle. Period. They will still be vastly, unimaginably rich. They will go on accumulating more money, probably faster than any wealth tax will be able to appropriate it, without doing *anything*.

No one deserves to be paid more in a year for simply existing than an average human needs to spend in their entire lives on food, clothing, and shelter.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#187

Post by dcolkitt » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

protoman3000 wrote: post #146

dcolkitt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposing a wealth cap like that is a fantastic way to assure that those basic needs will never be met. Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistribution of existing wealth. All of it came from raising economic productivity. And that vast majority of those productivity gains had foundations built by entrepreneurs seeking gre…

> Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty > by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.

Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey.

Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen?

Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#188

Post by libertine » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

jonfw wrote: post #24

david927 wrote: post #3

Until there's a wealth floor -- until everyone is fed, sheltered and has access to education, there needs to be a wealth cap. We, as a collective humanity, should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million, until the basic needs of others have been met.

Let's say I start a Saas company and it does really well. Somebody offers to invest at a valuation of 25$ million bucks. By most standards of evaluation net worth- I'm worth $25 million bucks now. who seizes ownership of my company? What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich? Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract

>Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract

If it's abstract why can you use it as collateral? You have to make up your mind, it's funny money or real money?

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#189

Post by w0de0 » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

yayr wrote: post #177

w0de0 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good god, man. This is slavish. And - I'll note - not unpopular, which is distressing. Tax isn't punishment. Ever. Especially when tax rate is already so low that the proposed "emergency tax" is still less than historical income tax rates. Tax is part of the social contract that allowed those billionaires the stability, educated workforce, infrastructure, safety from theft, etc, etc, etc, needed to build and maintain…

you should read again - systems for redistribution of wealth can be good if they are not broken. Income taxes e.g. are imo a great way to do this, if they cannot be avoided. However, to tax an increase in share price without any transaction is often counterproductive.

You're absolutely right. Once I saw you characterize a tax as a punishment, billionaires as "people who know how to invest [wealth] efficiently and distribute it," and wealth as solely the result of "build[ing] economically viable organisations," I dismissed the details of your argument.

Re: Millionaires call for an emergency tax on billionaires

#190

Post by david927 » Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

jayjader wrote: post #139

simonh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is not really to do with equality, it's to do with who runs companies and where investment in the economy comes from, and how everyone's basic needs are met. This would take the ownership of huge swathes of the companies in the world out of the hands of the people who created them and operate them and into the hands of random executives with little or no track record. You're not going to meet an…

> For example, Elon Musk would be forced to sell all but a minuscule sliver of his shares in Tesla, SpaceX, etc and give the proceeds to the tax man. He'd be out on his arse and replaced by an executive hired by whoever bought the shares. It would be the death of Tesla and SpaceX as we know them. The point is that Musk would/should never have gotten to such an oversized amount of control in the first place, and thus…

That was really well put.